LL is sitting on a gold mine

[BilliJo Aldrin]

3 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Nevertheless, private estates are much more attractive in general.

I'm not saying that you are wrong. What I am saying is that I see no gouging and outrageous sale prices on mainland (I don't visit adult land and I think that gouging does occur there, but that's only a small bit of mainland). I'm also saying that doing what you suggest would have effects on pivate estates. LL can see the whole picture, and only they can know what the potential outcomes of your suggestion would be.

Incidentally, how big would these 1L parcels be? 512m, 2048m, whole sims? You can't just say "per parcel". And don't forget that LL sold the mainland in whole sims for thousands of US$ per sim. Perhaps that was before your time, but to turn around now and sell mainland for a nominal pittance wouldn't be quite right. Yes, I know that those who bought the sims cut them up and sold them on. Even so, people have been buying land at reasonable prices since the start. Suddenly making land worthless wouldn't be the best of ideas that LL could come up with, imo.

A better idea is one that some of us have been suggesting for many years. Abandon the doubling of land sizes for tier; i.e. 512, 1024, 2048 .... 32k, 64k. If we were able to pay for the land we want, I am sure that more mainland would be used. But increasing the tier by a large amount from say, 32k to 64k, puts people off from stepping up. E.g. if someone has 32k, and wants a bit more, they can't have it without hugely increasing their tier up to the 64k level. But if they could add, say, another 4k to their 32k and only pay for the new size, adding land would be much more attractive.

Having said that, we don't see the whole picture and it would undoubtedly result in people with, say 32k, reducing to, say, 24k, because they don't need all the 32k.

None of it simple. LL can see the whole picture, and make reasonable guestimates on the outcome of changes. We can't. You can't, and I can't.

I would have made the standard parcel 4096 since that seems to be the most popular size on estates.

I totally agree that tiers should increase incrementally instead of by doubling. I have a 8192 on a mature sim, I might be tempted to buy a bit more land if I didn't have to jump to the 16384 tier level

[BilliJo Aldrin]

4 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

It's because they don't sell land - not even for 1L. They never did. But you know that. All they want is a tenant. The 1L and 0L is just a way of making it seem cheap - a bit of a con, really.

I'd still like to know what size the 1L mainland parcels will be that you propose.

 

Mainland is exactly like estates. For 1 L you are buying the right to pay tier/rent to someone.. either the estate owner or Linden Lab.

LL needs the tier, not some inflated upfront charge.

The one good thing about land gougers, LL is collecting tier from them while they sit on the overpriced parcels.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

4 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

It's because they don't sell land - not even for 1L. They never did. But you know that. All they want is a tenant. The 1L and 0L is just a way of making it seem cheap - a bit of a con, really.

I'd still like to know what size the 1L mainland parcels will be that you propose.

 

Mainland is exactly like estates. For 1 L you are buying the right to pay tier/rent to someone.. either the estate owner or Linden Lab.

LL needs the tier, not some inflated upfront charge.

The one good thing about land gougers, LL is collecting tier from them while they sit on the overpriced parcels.

[ChinRey]

17 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I will not buy mainland or hell even rent on it.  why, because the griping and complaining of certain sets of members, if I block teh whole region from being flown over, I'm evil, if I do basically anything with the region I rent, I'm evil.   nope.  private estates, even if they cost a little more are well worth it.

No need to complain or argue about that. If you want to block off a whole sim from public access, then yes, a private island is a better option than a mainland sim. It's better for you and it's better for SL as a whole. That's just a fact - no need for hard feelings at all.

Edited November 24, 2017 by ChinRey

[Phil Deakins]

15 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Mainland is exactly like estates. For 1 L you are buying the right to pay tier/rent to someone.. either the estate owner or Linden Lab.

LL needs the tier, not some inflated upfront charge.

The one good thing about land gougers, LL is collecting tier from them while they sit on the overpriced parcels.

Yes, they are the same, except for one thing. When you 'buy' from an estate owner or another user (mainland), you don't actually get to own the land as such. We agree on that. But there is a difference. With mainland, you can sell it on for whatever you like. You can't do that with estate land. With estate land, you only 'buy' the right to use the land, and you can only use it within the covenant that the user-owner has written. I do understand what you are saying though.

There's something else to consider with your proposal. People who bought mainland paid a reasonable amount for it. An extreme is a whole sim, for which they would have paid hundreds of US$, if not more. Your proposal would instantly make their sims worth 16L each (that's less than 10 cents), because, with LL selling mainland at 1L per 4k, that's all they wouild be worth if they decided to sell. LL isn't going to do that. At least LL had better NOT do that. No company in their right mind would do that to their paying customers.

Edited November 24, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

23 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

LL needs the tier, not some inflated upfront charge.

They get the tier already - from those estate islands. Yes, it's less than they get from a diced mainland sim, but a significant number of estate sims would disappear, so they'd lose that tier. You are talking about moving people from estates to mainland, and not about increased land ownership.

[Phil Deakins]

33 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

The one good thing about land gougers, LL is collecting tier from them while they sit on the overpriced parcels.

Where are these overpriced mainland parcels - this price-gouging? I was looking at mainland parcels for sale a couple of days ago, and I didn't see any. Where are they?

Edited November 24, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[Conifer Dada]

My suggestion, which I've made before, is for Linden Lab to raise the tier-free land allowance from 512 sq m to 1024 sq m.  Yes, they'd lose some income from existing landowners, but a 1024 square is more of an incentive to go Premium than a 512 rectangle and it doubles the prim allowance or whatever it's called these days..

[LittleMe Jewell]

7 minutes ago, Conifer Dada said:

My suggestion, which I've made before, is for Linden Lab to raise the tier-free land allowance from 512 sq m to 1024 sq m.  Yes, they'd lose some income from existing landowners, but a 1024 square is more of an incentive to go Premium than a 512 rectangle and it doubles the prim allowance or whatever it's called these days..

I think if they did this, combined with changing the tier structure from the current 'doubling', then they would actually increase Premium memberships as well as the amount of land people own, thus increasing their monthly tier income.

 

As to price gouging on the mainland, the only place I see things as extremely pricey is Adult sims, next to the water and next to roadways.

[Phil Deakins]

12 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

As to price gouging on the mainland, the only place I see things as extremely pricey is Adult sims, next to the water and next to roadways.

Yes, I know it happens on adult land. I don't about waterside and roadside though. They cost more, yes, because they are more desirable, but gouging isn't the word for it, imo. Anyone who owns waterside land, and wants to sell it, is not going to sell it at the same price as inland land. They are naturally going to try to get what it's worth. That's what I saw a couple of days ago - waterside costs more. It's always been that way. It's not gouging.

Edited November 24, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[LittleMe Jewell]

17 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Yes, I know it happens on adult land. I don't about waterside and roadside though. They cost more, yes, because they are more desirable, but gouging isn't the word for it, imo. Anyone who owns waterside land, and wants to sell it, is not going to sell it at the same price as inland land. They are naturally going to try to get what it's worth. That's what I saw a couple of days ago - waterside costs more. It's always been that way. It's not gouging.

Yeah, I don't know that I'd call it gouging (well, maybe a few of the water spots that I've spotted).  I was just noting that those types of parcels are really the only ones that I'd even call extremely pricey.

[Phil Deakins]

And those are the ones that you, and most people, would probably want. Hence the higher price.

There used to be (probably still are) parcels that are ridculously priced; e.g. an inland, nothing special, 1024 set for sale at 75,000L. My theory on those is that the owner hopes that a potential buyer will misread the price, thinking it's 7500L, and mistakenly buy it.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Perhaps a way to increase mainland usage would be to re-landscape some of the large swathes of abandoned land so it's more in keeping with what's popular. It wouldn't have to be another Blake Sea, but how about some pretty lakes and rivers?

[Phil Deakins]

Nice idea, Bitsy. The sim I'm in is really badly landscaped. The sea is nearby, and rock ground is the highest - a lot of it - but there isn't much grassland in between. It's too unrealistic. It didn't bother me when I got it because it was only for a store, and the type of ground didn't matter for that, especially since my stores were always in the sky.

Edited November 24, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[Theresa Tennyson]

14 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Ok, the tier of a full sim on mainland is 195 dollars of which an unknown amount is profit after all the expenses of hosting the sim and running LL are deducted. Ungrandfathered / non buy down estate sims net LL an additional profit of 100 dollars a month. But what about the goldmine they are sitting on?

 I refer to all that abandoned mainland. 

Tier on a 1/16 sim parcel (4096 sq m) is 25 dollars a month. If 8 such parcels are occupied, that bring in the equivalent of rent for a full sim.

But if all 16 parcels are rented, the tier for that sim becomes 400 dollars a month of which 200 dollars is pure profit over the normal profit. 

Why oh why doesn't LL subdivide all of mainland, and offer it for sale at 1 L a parcel, just like estates do.

Even a partial migration back to mainland would greatly increase LL's income from land tier.

I'm sure many more people would love to live on mainland if only it wasn't so difficult to obtain land with paying land gouger prices.

Just my thoughts, even though i'm sure they will be ridiculed, shot down, dismissed, and torn apart.

*shrugs*

 

You assume that the people buying the lots for L$1 actually will pay tier.

From my experience watching years worth of mainland neighbors, what will happen is people will buy the land and either not think about tier or assume that they can pay for it by some cockamamie money-making scheme.

I've seen it all - shops full of affiliate vendors; venues that had no publicity or events; and my persona favorite, the person who bought 1024 square meters in the middle of a largely empty region, slapped up some prims and put up some vendors selling some of Arcadia Asylums free full-perm spaceships for L$10,000 or L20,000, on the blind hope that someone both wealthy and utterly clueless would randomly wander into this speck of a store and shell out massive amounts of money on freebies.

I've watched places like that come and go all around me for years. Many of them were there for no more than a couple of months before being abandoned.

Meanwhile, if there are vast swaths of land available for L$1, that will shatter the market for people who are in the business of selling land and who pay tier until that land is sold. The more idiotic and price-gouging the amount, the longer they'll have to keep paying tier on it. Meanwhile, I've not had much problem finding desirable land for myself and my "family" at prices that are reasonable compared to the tier I know I'll be paying for years because I bought it because I wanted it.

As I said in an earlier post replying to this scheme of yours, Linden Lab tried doing something very similar a few years ago; what happened was exactly what I'm describing.

[Phil Deakins]

9 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Linden Lab tried doing something very similar a few years ago;

Do you mean selling land in the auction with a starting price of 1L per sqm.? If that's what you mean, don't they do it now?

ETA: Come to think of it, I don't remember seeing any purple-coloured land for a long time.

Edited November 24, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Do you mean selling land in the auction with a starting price of 1L per sqm.? If that's what you mean, don't they do it now?

ETA: Come to think of it, I don't remember seeing any purple-coloured land for a long time.

Instead of auctioning or holding abandoned land, they automatically put it on sale for L$1 per square meter.

[Phil Deakins]

Ah. Ty. They probably just do it with some selected land. None of the abandoned land in the sim I'm in is for sale, and I haven't seen any of it for sale since I abandoned it, although a few bits did get new owners at some stage.

[KairisLove]

yes , in my area i seen 2 lindens then next day saw auction lands

[Vivienne Schell]

14 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Edit: Going to the fabulous grid servey for some facts:

20.7% to 21.4% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels (details - 11th Jan 2017)

Complete facts are:

57% of Mainland owned directly by Linden Accounts (Contiguous Mainland is 6806 regions including Linden Home regions)

20.7% to 21.4% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels

 

Means that land not available for residents sums up to roughly 78 percent. That´s quite  a lot! Question is if demand would justify making this gigantic space available (I seriously doubt that).

Maybe some landscaping and polish would help to raise demand, but then: Who would go for it? There are not the high numbers of customers flocking into SL as there were when LL added all these continents. SL has become some kind of closed circle of die hards meanwhile, as is now it does not have the potential to be more than that. Even with polished landscaping - no way. There was and still is is too much basically wrong at the Lab to make another newbie invasion happen.

In the end private estates would suffer. And private estates are the main cow LL milks. They´d shoot their own foot by making too much mainland available.

[Lexbot Sinister]

I also think LL should consider cutting up some land on the mainland, and set it for sale. There are many people that either have premium, or consider premium but looking for decently priced land on mainland is prohibitively hard and the parcels are severely overpriced, considering a lot of them were sold back when ALL land that was abandoned became set for sale at 1L$/sqm automatically. 

I don't think the competition with estates and estate renters would be that great, as i believe it's a different demographic. It's people without any interest in paying for Premium, and people who want better management/control than Mainland can offer.

 

The problem is rather land value, and if it makes people less inclined to hang on to the land they currently posses. When all abandoned mainland was set automatically for a superlow price, the land value plummeted like a rock, and if you bought/sold, you would go below 1 L$/sqm. Right now the average is higher, but i don't know any exact numbers. It seems to be somewhere between 6-20 L$/sqm, depending on attractiveness.

The other thing is that if less land is available, people are less inclined to abandon their parcel. Land without value can be bought and abandoned at a whim, at any time. If you abandon land with a higher value, there is a loss, and if you want to buy some again, it will be at a significant cost, so people are more likely to hang on, and keep paying tier.

 

[Claireschen Hesten]

41 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Do you mean selling land in the auction with a starting price of 1L per sqm.? If that's what you mean, don't they do it now?

ETA: Come to think of it, I don't remember seeing any purple-coloured land for a long time.

A couple of months ago land in a neighbouring sim to mine was auctioned off definitely purple on map around the time some near by land a store was on in my sim got reclaimed and abandoned, the most that's happened in the sim since is all but 512sqm of abandoned land as far back as 2010 got consolidated in to one lot of abandoned land so lucky or not all the land around me and in direct border sims is either abandoned or protected 

[Phil Deakins]

Perhaps they just auction the prime plots, set some for sale, and do nothing with most.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

5 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

Yes, they are the same, except for one thing. When you 'buy' from an estate owner or another user (mainland), you don't actually get to own the land as such. We agree on that. But there is a difference. With mainland, you can sell it on for whatever you like. You can't do that with estate land. With estate land, you only 'buy' the right to use the land, and you can only use it within the covenant that the user-owner has written. I do understand what you are saying though.

There's something else to consider with your proposal. People who bought mainland paid a reasonable amount for it. An extreme is a whole sim, for which they would have paid hundreds of US$, if not more. Your proposal would instantly make their sims worth 16L each (that's less than 10 cents), because, with LL selling mainland at 1L per 4k, that's all they wouild be worth if they decided to sell. LL isn't going to do that. At least LL had better NOT do that. No company in their right mind would do that to their paying customers.

Yes, they are paying customers.. they are paying $195 dollars a month in tier. If they go one day over their renewal date,  they will owe another $195 dollars. If it takes 6 months to sell, thats 1200 US  dollars waiting to find a buyer. If  I was done with owning a full sim, I'd just turn it back to Linden Lab.

The good thing is, if they change their minds a few months down the road , they get another whole sim for 16 L

 

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

28 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Perhaps they just auction the prime plots, set some for sale, and do nothing with most.

No land goes up for auction unless someone puts in a ticket asking to purchase it, at which point LL puts it up for auction, unless there is a strong case for direct sale. LL employees don't just wander around mainland putting land up for sale.

 

Edited November 24, 2017 by BilliJo Aldrin
deleted two lines... Bad BJ, bad bad BJ